Tomasz Mrozewski

In 2003, Mark Sampson joined the flood of English as a second language teachers flocking to Asia for employment. Korea has been a particular draw for ESL teachers, renowned for generous contracts and a high quality of life. Peaking at about 22,000 foreign teachers there in 2011 with a slight decline since, the trend has seen…

In one thread of Struan Sinclair’s debut novel, Automatic World, an unidentified, amnesiac narrator has lost his identity and almost his life in a fire. We meet this character in the process of reassembling his body and mind: his sense of social reality has been set askew and he cannot make sequential sense of the world around…

Ernst Zundel’s former lair on Toronto’s Carlton Street loomed over my Cabbagetown childhood; the fortress, with its gates and barred windows, security cameras and propaganda-scrolling marquee, lay on my route to school. Too young at the time to understand the full implications of the ominous sight, I was disturbed by my mother’s account of Zundel’s very public…

A  friend from rural Vermont recently berated me for thinking I could ever find warmth or friendliness in a big city. “You can’t smile at anyone,” he claimed, “because they’ll shoot you!” Unfortunately, my friend’s prejudice against cities is reflected in a broad trend in contemporary urban literature. Our literary cities seethe with iniquity. One wrong step and you could find yourself…

Elizabeth McClung has staked a claim and is guarding it viciously. “Every single review has implied that if you are some flower sniffing, dewy-eyed, love watching Little House on the Prairies person and you read Zed,” she writes in her blog (Screw Bronze! <elizabethmcclung.blogspot.com), “then you will be found drooling and twitching over page 212 and spend the rest of your days in a locked ward.” McClung seems to believe that there are two kinds of people in the world: the twee and cowardly on one…